France: Support Scheme for up to 30 Solar Heating and Cooling Systems

One of the successful show cases of solar cooling applications in France: The vinery in Banyuls, in the south of France, where 130 m² of vacuum tube collectors supply an absorption chiller with 52 kW cooling capacity since 1991.
Photo: Tecsol

Daniel Mugnier from Tecsol was satisfied when French solar industry association Enerplan and the French Environment & Energy Management Agency Ademe jointly announced the beginning of the French Solar Heating and Cooling Development Programme in January this year. For the last years, the engineering company Tecsol had been after a support scheme for solar cooling applications. It was first promised to the engineers that Fonds Chaleur would support this kind of technology, a grant scheme for renewable heating systems launched in December of 2008 (see further details in the database of incentive programmes). The final regulations, however, did not include solar cooling as an eligible technology.

After one year of intense consultation and planning, Mugnier is now satisfied with the new scheme supporting 15 to 30 large solar heating and cooling systems during the next two and a half years. ”In close cooperation within the Emergence working group and with international experts of Task 38, we developed a very promising method of how to select well-performing demo installations,” Mugnier explains in the attached presentation designed for European level dissemination and with the support of EU R&D programs, such as SOLAIR. Task 38 is part of the Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (SHC) by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Members of the Emergence working group were, among others, the French utilities EDF and GDF, Enerplan, the National Institute for Solar Energy (Ines) and Ademe.

In his statement, Mugnier refers to a newly developed check-list including 20 questions and a scoring method, which is thought to give a clear picture of whether the project may be realistic and has a chance of success. “Since the beginning of 2009, we adjusted the questions, weighted the answers and therewith extracted warning messages about non-realistic projects,” the Tecsol employee explains. You can order the English version of the check-list at: romain@tecsol.fr.

A score above 10 points means the project will be approved for the support scheme's feasibility studies and may receive grants throughout all phases of planning and realization (if confirmed at the feasibility stage), as well as for the initial investment costs and the monitoring system (details on the maximum amount of grants in all three categories can be looked up in the database of incentive programmes).

Approval of the first projects is expected for June 2010.

More information:
Tecsol SA
Mr Romain SIRÉ
+33 (4) 68 68 16 40
romain@tecsol.fr